By Tracy
Our
son Tim recently found this old photo which we thought we'd share as we
are soon to mark our thirtieth anniversary of being together, and it
was taken around the time we were first married. (In Fremantle.) It was a very simple wedding, with our publishers as our two witnesses -- and that was it...
Granular
in memory of Lyn Hejinian
Granular as people
to people, arraying
with modicums
and substantials,
setting implication
of dead places
brought alive
where a quote
becomes the ‘my’
of an anecdote;
brief as interruption
of decades, broadcast
resumed and reception
a tool of wonder
as northern lights
freak southern lights
and vice versa.
Teaching-tool
of the time,
all in thrall
but liberated;
the clouds
were somewhere
lost
but reform over lines
too long
to condense.
John Kinsella
It is deeply affirming to see the peaceful campaigning against military connections and associations in Australian universities. Demilitarisation of places of learning is something I have been strongly advocating for over many years, and it surprises me that it has taken this long to become a focal point of rights issues. University involvement in militarism has frequently been the case, and it remains the case, even where universities deny such connections. My email signature at one university I am associated with reads:
for the complete demilitarisation of universities, schools, and places of learning
Having experienced ostracism and complaints (to put it mildly) within [that] university because of my stance, I wonder how the entrenched militarists feel about broader protest action? And I make this post as a plea for consistency among the protesters — ALL military associations lead to death somewhere in the world, and ALL military associations are culpable. Divestment (as the terms goes... placing it within its capitalist ambit and reflecting part of the core issue) from ALL weapons-related 'defence industry' and interests is the only just approach.
To be selective is to condone death and suffering for 'other' people, to justify violence under 'certain circumstances' — the reason the cycles of violence persist in the world and dominate human interactions, ensuring the perpetuation of injustice. Divest should mean cease. Divest should mean there can be no learning with the spectre of death underwriting one's studies. Whether it's working on submarine sonar or receiving funding from any of the military-profiteering companies, it comes down to the same issue: these are modes predicated on death.
See this poem from 2020 written to a VC and university hierarchy about 'defence' industry ties to universities.
John Kinsella
14/5/2024
To Vice-Chancellors and Board Members of Australian Universities
I wish to:
1. Support the absolute right for students to protest/camp etc. peacefully on university campuses.
2. Denounce the genocide being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza. Further, to note the ongoing systemic oppression and neo-colonialism enacted by Israel’s government, military and settler-culture.
3. I wish to affirm universal human rights.
4. Speaking from a pacifist position that rejects all forms of violence, I wish to restate my many decades-long objection to weapons production (for anyone anywhere), the military in all its forms, and places of learning being used directly or indirectly for these purposes. It is abhorrent that universities have so deeply connected themselves with ‘defence’ — an industry of death.
5. Speak against any form of support for such violence.
6. Speak in support of diverse communities across the globe that respect each other, share space and materials, and are mutually supporting.
Thanks.
Sincerely,
Emeritus Professor John Kinsella, poet, environmentalist, peace activist and writer
Cultivation
One of my students showed me the orchards
of her family deleted, the land rewritten.
And photos of the displaced and lost.
That was a year before the invasion
of Gaza and the erasure of trees
down to the splinters of stories.
The granaries broken, houses
split open, and now the last refuge
to be raised and offered as proof
of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-
hawks, griffons... no longer raptors
but lost to the vanishing point.
Erosion is policy and endgame
its intonation. The Israeli military
is attempting to rewrite definitions
of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.
Closing the crossing, harrying
the edges, compressing and dispersing
the soil until it is dust or slurry.
Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.
John Kinsella
Threnody
Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s
hold on the grace of night which has seeped
into day through rips in walls of sky,
through holes in the carpet of earth —
fractures of rock and pits of sand.
Each martial act undoes the baby’s
cry for milk, the silently feeding lips
which would continue into sleep;
and when shells lob as precise
as history it wakes before it dies.
Each martial act is enabled by the silence
of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making
a living’, an expression that falls as dead
prayers over distance, over the local.
The desert owl remembers differently.
The desert owl remembers the same.
John Kinsella
Elegy for Marjorie
I’ll talk as if neither of us are here,
leaves that cling or won’t fall,
fourth person in the dialogue.
When the body dissolves, a unity
forms around sand and leaves,
the very specific songs of remaining
words. In the absence of lyrics,
we make an assemblage of protests.
In a lyric of absence, we haul
a grammar across that landscaping.
Many meanings reduce to one
when we try to utter ‘development’.
Others will be having this conversation,
too. Now we’ve sorted the issue
of distance. Once. For all. And.
John Kinsella
